Binance Research's 2030 base case asks tokenized stocks to grow 79-fold from $4.43 billion

Binance Research, the exchange's research arm, published the forecast on September 18 as an update to a May 15 analysis ^[1]. Working backward from this year's gain, the tokenized equity market started 2026 at about $903 million ^[1]. That leaves about $3.5 billion of new balance, added over eight and a half months, as the whole record the forecast extends ^[2].

The base case is a 78.8-fold increase on the September balance ^[3]. If 2030 means the end of that year, about 4.3 years after the snapshot, the market has to compound at roughly 176% a year, nearly tripling every year ^[4]. The bull case is 223 times today's balance ^[6]. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng, citing the same data, said the shift "won't happen overnight" ^[9].

The forecast is aggressive, or rather it is aggressive in one denominator. Measured against today's listed-equity market, the base case would be about 0.23% and the bull case about 0.65% ^[8]. Even the high scenario leaves more than 99% of today's listed value off-chain ^[8].

The report argues that use matters as much as issuance ^[12], and the dollars in use are small. If the September activation rate applies to the full balance, about $334 million of tokenized stock is deployed in on-chain applications ^[9]. Apply the January rate to roughly $903 million and you get about $18 million ^[10]. Deployed value grew about nineteenfold while the balance grew about fivefold ^[10]. Equities are about 13% of the $34.18 billion in on-chain real-world assets, a category that grew 85.2% this year ^[11][8].

The next four years can go a few ways. Balances could jump in steps if US venues issue at scale, through the SEC's temporary exemption ^[10] or NYSE's planned platform ^[11]. Growth confined to crypto-native venues would probably slow as the base gets bigger, pulling the path toward the low case. Or balances could rise while activation stalls, producing a headline number made of tokens that sit idle.

I think the low case is the one today's record supports. The base case asks a market whose documented surge covers eight and a half months to nearly triple every year until 2030 ^[4]. The strongest case against that view is that one approved regulated venue would change the shape of the curve, adding listed stock in large blocks that a compounding model cannot anticipate. The low-case view would be wrong if NYSE's platform wins approval ^[11] and the activation rate then holds at or above its September level as balances climb.